Peter Landesman Quotes

I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.

Film brings together framing and light and color and performance and music and all of that. To me, everything I've done in my life has been preparing me for filmmaking.

There will always been the prurient rubbernecking aspect to disasters: people who just can't get enough gore.

I can't worry about the consequences of what I do; that's not my job.

Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people - the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close.

'Parkland' is not out to pick a fight and start a dialogue about conspiracy.

One way to test a picture's integrity is to turn it upside down - a technique used not only by connoisseurs but also by artists trying to see their work with a fresh eye.

Like every other industry or institution, the journalism world is populated by the petty and fearful, in addition to the courageous and brilliant.

People go to the movies to have an emotional experience, not to learn information they could look up on Wikipedia.

I was a painter, then a novelist, then a journalist, then a screenwriter, and now I'm a director, and it feels all part of the same continuum. One led to the other, and it just feels like the natural confluence of all the ways of storytelling that I've been doing for almost 30 years.

There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story.

My politics are very centrist and sometimes, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, lean to the right.

The story of Bennet Omalu is a riveting story; it's just a riveting tale. I knew from the beginning if I stayed close to that kind of storytelling and focussed on the character, then the other stuff comes along with it, and the message becomes baked into the journey.

We've all seen 'Network' and 'Wag the Dog,' but we were somehow insulated by the fact that those were just movies, fictions, and we could rest easy that the Real News doesn't operate that way. Well, it does - sometimes.

You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.

I always spend a good deal of time with the people I write about. I try and smell the normalcy of their lives. I try to look at the normal rhythm of their life.

Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don't care if it's $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it's director and performance, and I don't find a big difference.

When you're researching something for a movie, you get a very different kind of reaction than when you're researching something for an article for 'The New York Times.'

Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality - its beauty, as conventionally understood - than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status.

I consider myself neither liberal nor conservative when it comes to foreign policy.

Sony is the only studio without broadcast relationships with the NFL.

Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.

Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.

I was a war correspondent. I've watched great people crumble under pressure and make bad decisions.

I'd followed the strange deaths of pro football players for years, sensing something odd going on.

I am an old journalist, so I always do a lot of research and dive deep into people's character, who they are, and their motivation.

I had a very strong background in journalism, so it's my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.

The itinerary of most antiquities from their source - tomb, temple, quarry - to the shelves of museums or private collectors is murky and often purposely concealed.

I don't actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same.

I love the game. I love to watch. I watch it with my kids. I'm able to divorce the beauty of the athletics from the corporate entity that is the National Football League.

Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

Will Smith is the most successful money-making movie star on planet Earth, in terms of just how many people have gone to see his films, so Will is a guy who gets movies made.

I wouldn't let my children play football.

I played football the whole time I was growing up, and through two years of college. I think it's a beautiful game in many respects, one that allows you to follow a player from boyhood through manhood.

Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.

Hard information on the quantity of bogus art sold is difficult to come by, in part because fraud, when discovered by dealers and auction houses, is usually kept secret to boost public confidence in the art market.

Melted down, silver is worth a little more than four dollars an ounce. But carved, inlaid, and engraved, and identified with a particular year, it becomes the direct reflection, often the literal record, of human history, our movement through time.

I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism.

I was a war correspondent and journalist for a long time, and I was very near the towers on 9/11 and very shortly after in Afghanistan.

I did nothing at the behest of the NFL, for the NFL, against the NFL.

14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness.

The trains that travel the Chunnel are massive machines. The Eurostars are bullet-shaped and a quarter-mile long. They are pulled by a 136,000-pound locomotive and move in the open air at 185 m.p.h. and through the tunnel at 100 m.p.h.

I love football. I played it into two years of college.